Abstract: The amount of digitized legacy documents has been rising dramatically over the last years due mainly to the increasing number of on-line digital libraries publishing this kind of documents, waiting to be classified and finally transcribed into a textual electronic format (such as ASCII or PDF). Nevertheless, most of the available fully-automatic applications addressing this task are far from being perfect and heavy and inefficient human intervention is often required to check and correct the results of such systems. In contrast, multimodal interactive-predictive approaches may allow the users to participate in the process helping the system to improve the overall performance. With this in mind, two sets of recent advances are introduced in this work: a novel interactive method for text block detection and two multimodal interactive handwritten text transcription systems which use active learning and interactive-predictive technologies in the recognition process.

Abstract: In this paper, we present a word spotting framework that follows the query-by-string paradigm where word images are represented both by textual and visual representations. The textual representation is formulated in terms of character $n$-grams while the visual one is based on the bag-of-visual-words scheme. These two representations are merged together and projected to a sub-vector space. This transform allows to, given a textual query, retrieve word instances that were only represented by the visual modality. Moreover, this statistical representation can be used together with state-of-the-art indexation structures in order to deal with large-scale scenarios. The proposed method is evaluated using a collection of historical documents outperforming state-of-the-art performances.

Abstract: Historical records of daily activities provide intriguing insights into the life of our ancestors, useful for demographic and genealogical research. For example, marriage license books have been used for centuries by ecclesiastical and secular institutions to register marriages. These books follow a simple structure of the text in the records with a evolutionary vocabulary, mainly composed of proper names that change along the time. This distinct vocabulary makes automatic transcription and semantic information extraction difficult tasks. In previous works we studied the use of category-based language models and how a Grammatical Inference technique known as MGGI could improve the accuracy of these tasks. In this work we analyze the main causes of the semantic errors observed in previous results and apply a better implementation of the MGGI technique to solve these problems. Using the resulting language model, transcription and information extraction experiments have been carried out, and the results support our proposed approach.

Abstract: Many historical manuscripts that hold trustworthy memories of the past societies contain information organized in a structured layout (e.g. census, birth or marriage records). The precious information stored in these documents cannot be effectively used nor accessed without costly annotation efforts. The transcription driven by the semantic categories of words is crucial for the subsequent access. In this paper we describe an approach to extract information from structured historical handwritten text images and build a knowledge representation for the extraction of meaning out of historical data. The method extracts information, such as named entities, without the need of an intermediate transcription step, thanks to the incorporation of context information through language models. Our system has two variants, the first one is based on bigrams, whereas the second one is based on recurrent neural networks. Concretely, our second architecture integrates a Convolutional Neural Network to model visual information from word images together with a Bidirecitonal Long Short Term Memory network to model the relation among the words. This integrated sequential approach is able to extract more information than just the semantic category (e.g. a semantic category can be associated to a person in a record). Our system is generic, it deals with out-of-vocabulary words by design, and it can be applied to structured handwritten texts from different domains. The method has been validated with the ICDAR IEHHR competition protocol, outperforming the existing approaches.

Abstract: Infographics communicate information using a combination of textual, graphical and visual elements. This work explores the automatic understanding of infographic images by using a Visual Question Answering technique. To this end, we present InfographicVQA, a new dataset comprising a diverse collection of infographics and question-answer annotations. The questions require methods that jointly reason over the document layout, textual content, graphical elements, and data visualizations. We curate the dataset with an emphasis on questions that require elementary reasoning and basic arithmetic skills. For VQA on the dataset, we evaluate two Transformer-based strong baselines. Both the baselines yield unsatisfactory results compared to near perfect human performance on the dataset. The results suggest that VQA on infographics--images that are designed to communicate information quickly and clearly to human brain--is ideal for benchmarking machine understanding of complex document images. The dataset is available for download at docvqa. org